(…) the Palatine gallery of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. Hardly so shabby, really, when he could have his audience walk through the Uffizi, past all the Botticellis, Uccellos, and Piero della Francescas that matter, across the Ponte Vecchio via the secret corridor built by the Medicis, and thus present his collection. (…)The vestiges of the ancient Classical theme were apparent—gilded wreaths, tiaras implanted with silver lyres—but then again, they were only a part of the extraordinary things Michele does to frame and individualize his cast of characters. There were leopard-spot turbans, head scarves, woolly bandeaux, nerdy tinted spectacles, glittery-framed sunglasses, piled-up almost-medieval hairpieces. Pearls were woven into flowing tresses or, in one case, fashioned into an all-over helmet with stuck-on beads encroaching onto the face. (…) There is playfulness and conscious self-parody going on now. What stops it from falling off the edge into first-degree literalness is the underlying oddness: There’s something unsettling, almost undead, about his strange breed of wan eyebrow-less girls and geeky boys. Michele had the lines of “A Song For Bacchus,” a poem written in the 15th century by Lorenzo de’ Medici, embroidered onto the stools upon which they were seated. “How beautiful our Youth is/That’s always flying by us/Who’d be happy let him be so:/Nothing’s sure about tomorrow.” Carpe diem. That’s a modern-enough sounding moral for most of us today.

by SARAH MOWER - Vogue.com